


For Queen and Country

by tenzo



Category: Doctor Who
Genre: Gen, POV Minor Character
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-09-21
Updated: 2010-09-21
Packaged: 2017-10-12 01:52:35
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,600
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/119478
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tenzo/pseuds/tenzo
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Yvonne Hartman, at the beginning.</p>
            </blockquote>





	For Queen and Country

Like many British organizations founded during a certain period, the Torchwood Institute maintained a few mildly esoteric traditions that, in our modern age, might seem to be at odds with its goals of pure scientific research.

Yvonne Hartman's first summons to the Archive came in the form of a letter–written in anachronistic calligraphy on ornately blazoned stationery–which somehow magicked itself onto her desk, even though she hadn't left her seat for hours. Yet, when she reached over for the hundredth time to take a sip of coffee, she found instead both coffee and cup gone entirely, and in their place this letter.

It was all a bit Harry Potter.

She wasn't afraid. Torchwood, she had learned, always told the truth, if you let it, if you knew how to interpret its signs and read the lines in between the lines. Many of her colleagues in the lower levels of management joked about the Institute's secrecy and mysterious ways. Although Yvonne laughed along with them, she never fully understood what they were really getting at. There was nothing hidden in this place, if you knew how to look at it.

She was taken to the Archive in silence, by a wordless driver in a vehicle with blacked-out windows. She sat completely still, eyes forward, a satisfied smile playing at the edges of her mouth. Initiation into a mystery cult would inevitably come with pain, but she was ready.

***

She'd been dropped off and left in an airplane-hanger sized room, lit dimly from above by fluorescent lights that flickered as if waking from a long, long sleep. She was almost certainly underground. There was not a sound or trace of other humans, and the area around her was empty of anything beyond the occasional roof-supporting pillar.

A bit sparse for an archive, she thought.

She only presumed that this room had walls, as the darkness closed in before any could be seen. Her high heels clicked on the concrete floor as she slowly turned in place and considered what she was expected to do next. Would there be tests? Physical challenges? She regretted not wearing her one and only trouser suit today.

On the other hand, maybe this sort of uncertainty and lack of clear direction was part of it.

Without thinking any more about it, she began walking. The direction didn't matter, just that she'd considered her position and done something. She'd been purposefully removed from a context in which she'd be able to rely on any established procedures, and she wanted to demonstrate that she wasn't simply a drone, unable to act without command from above. She kept her rules and regulations close to her heart not because she lacked intelligence but because she was precisely intelligent enough to see how badly the world needed them.

As it turned out, the greatness of the distance to the room's boundaries was largely a trick of the light. She eventually did come to a wall–smooth, poured concrete, with little divots indicating rebar underneath. Keeping one hand trailing along the surface of it, she walked until she found a door. Perhaps it was the only door, perhaps there were many more not yet found. Continuing on and looking for others before deciding which to open did not occur to her.

She turned the knob, the mechanism clicking satisfyingly under her hands. That's fine, old-fashioned British workmanship, she thought, before flinging the door open and striding through the aperture.

***

The wooden box set on the table was painted blue, about the size and shape of what she'd always imagined a pirate's treasure chest to be. But there were no pirates here, and there was no glint of gold when she opened it.

What she did find within were papers, journals, bound reports and photographs, representing the clerical standards and practises of time periods spanning centuries. They were simply piled inside, in no particular order that she could discern, which made her organisational impulses bristle. At Torchwood, everything she'd ever come across was labelled, encrypted, filed and cross-referenced to within an inch of its life. This apparent disarray had to mean something.

She turned on the desk lamp–which was covered in dust as if no one had examined anything contained in this room for decades–and sat down. She felt at the level of her bones that this anomaly in the Institute's normal operating procedure was the key to getting the most out of the information contained within the box. It was not simply that there were facts to be learned but rather that there was a single question to be answered: _Why?_ And it was discovering the answer to this question that was her reason for being here.

***

A tear slid down Yvonne's cheek, its origin mysterious. She was not normally one for tears.

She'd sorted through the contents of this box and arranged everything in neat piles by apparent date. There was a precarious pyramid of handscrolls, seemingly of Asian provenance; a stack of decaying parchment, each page sealed within a protective plastic sheet; a tower-block of 50's era notebooks bound with black book-tape; and a row of mundane (to her eyes) binders filled with carefully three-hole-punched print-outs of emails and web-pages.

A chronological order had seemed logical, but she knew there had to be a reason why it had not been used by the curators of this singular collection. And so, she had begun to read, starting with the oldest documents and moving forward in time.

Each item told the story of one man–the same man. One man throughout all of history, with disaster and death always in his wake. He carried with him only an alias: the Doctor.

And yet... physical descriptions differed, as did the names of those select few whose company he kept. During a palace revolt in Tang Dynasty China, it was an older gentleman in a hat and a young girl with a fondness for explosives. The annals of the Starving Times of the Jamestown Colony told of a visitor with a booming voice and wild hair, accompanied by a young lady who couldn't seem to stop asking uncomfortable questions. In the last days of Pompeii, there was a young man in a brown suit along with a compassionate red-haired woman. Before the launch of the Titanic, a lone man in a black leather jacket and close-cropped hair. Yet this same man, with this same description, also appeared 40 years prior, in Cardiff during a small outbreak of mass-hysteria, this time accompanied by a blonde girl. The Torchwood Institute itself had been founded in the aftermath of one of his appearances, blood running down the walls of a fine country estate in Scotland.

And thus it continued. She'd noted ten different general descriptions of this man given, and kept track of it all on a bit of scratch paper fished out of her pocket. Now, looking over her work and the seeming tangle of this single man's life, she felt an actual physical pain in her heart and her breath caught in her throat.

New faces, new friends, always moving, always changing, surrounded by the great tragedies of history, she felt exhausted just looking at the evidence of it. Exhausted on his behalf.

She sat back in her chair and looked over her neat piles, her careful boundaries and unconscious adherence to the rules of cataloguing and filing (spines of books facing left, corners squared with the edges of the table). For Yvonne Hartman, child of a broken home, the big sister who could do no right even as her little brother could do no wrong, it kept the forces of chaos at bay, and had done all her life. Yet here was evidence of a man (or rather, an alien being who looked like a man–this was still Torchwood, after all) who embraced it, who seemingly tumbled through time and space without a destination, without even permanent family or friends who did not leave him (or perhaps die, she thought with a shudder). And everywhere the evidence of the wages of chaos: death, destruction, sorrow. What courage that must take, or what fool-hardiness. What arrogance.

Reaching out with a well-manicured hand, she pushed one of the ancient scrolls off the table. It landed with a clatter on the floor, and the echo seemed to call Yvonne's name seductively. She let another fall, and then another. Before she could think, or take her next breath, she was standing, flinging papers and books and hand-coloured photographs in all directions. They landed in piles on the floor, or gathered in great heaps and tangles on the table, and she didn't care.

Her hair came loose from the tight up-do she habitually wore, and she kicked the rickety wooden chair away from her, as if she were kicking all chairs, all rest, all complacency.

Turning away from the mess she'd created, she opened the door again and strode out, not stopping until she reached the location where she'd been dropped off, where the same vehicle was again waiting for her. She did not look back as she entered, sat down, and closed the door again.

She would do her duty, for Queen and country, as she always had–the anchor that kept her moored. And she would find this man. Whatever his capture would imply for the mission of the Torchwood Institute, for Yvonne Hartman it would mean release from the only doubt she'd ever felt–a final release, most likely, given the violence that so often accompanied him. It was a comforting thought.


End file.
